#got me out of some places. it's the themes of death applied to being trans and to feeling lost in life that got me out of some places.

[sschmendrick]

Sometimes I truly feel really dumb seeing all the people here and on the internet on general make amazing analysis of characters, of events, of parallels in books, movies, songs and whatnot. I feel very poor mentally when all I can see is cool images, amazing stories, and the best songs I get to listen to. I feel like I'm missing on so much, and always beein fed the analysis by other people because I just cannot do it on my own can be very tiring and sink the self-esteem. Especially as someone who's gonna end up working with artists I feel so out of place, like I shouldn't be there talking to them since I do not have the right tool to understand them.

What I hate most of all is that even the stuff that I adore I cannot dig into in a proper way. It's all feelings and it's not good enough.

[writcraft]

Rec List #1 Theme: 2018 Favourites (Non-Drarry)

One of my fandom resolutions is to rec more in 2019. I’m going to post rec lists for some of my favourite HP fics divided up by theme/content/ship or whatever I fancy throughout the year, aiming for one rec list a month with two in January. I thought I would kick off 2019 with two lists of 2018 favourites. This first one excludes Drarry because I’ve read mostly Drarry this year and limiting myself to ten recs per list would be impossible if I included all the Drarry I’ve enjoyed within a list of just ten. The second list will be my favourite Drarry fics of 2018, then I’ll move on to other themes for the remaining months.

Usual caveats for recs apply. This is by no means an exhaustive list, I could have recced many more. I’ve read and enjoyed a whole raft of terrific stories and this rec list is simply based on my personal tastes which may not be everybody else’s cuppa. Please heed the content warnings the author has flagged on AO3 in each case, some of these fics contain darker content and I haven’t listed out any warnings in my recs and summaries.

#1. A Radical Change in (Self) Perception by AnyaElizabeth

Severus Snape/Harry Potter | 57,114

Harry should know better than to touch museum exhibits, especially in a magical museum. Now he's in trouble...

My Rec: I haven’t read a huge amount of body swap fics and I can’t remember the last body swap Snarry I read, and I was so intrigued by how the author would handle this premise. I devoured the whole 50,000+ words in one sitting I was so engaged by this charming story. The body swap forced Harry and Severus to spend more time together but it did so much more than that - it enabled them to better understand one another and also themselves, when they saw each other through a different lens. The writing is terrific and if you’re a Snarry shipper this one is guaranteed to give you all the warm and fuzzies. A great addition to the wonderful Snarry fanfic that has posted throughout 2018.

#2. Hallo Spaceboy by @shiftylinguini

James Potter/Teddy Lupin | 10,075

“If this mirror could talk,” James remembers declaring, already one drink down and trying to tidy up his ridiculous costume eyeliner, “it would say we look bloody amazing.”

Teddy’s arm was warm when he wrapped it around James’s shoulder, pulling him closer.

“We always do, love.” Teddy tugged on a long curl of James’s hair before tucking it behind his ear, then smoothing the whole lot of it back. “We’re the fittest blokes at the party, us.”

James’d had to give up on the eyeliner after that; he was grinning too hard, flushed and happy and basking in Teddy’s attention (fit blokes, we’re fit blokes, that’s us), and he couldn't bloody stop.

Or: James kissed Teddy last night. This may or may not be the end of the world.

My Rec: A thoroughly charming fic featuring trans James waking up in the morning and coming to terms with a kiss with his best mate Teddy Lupin the night before. I loved the quietness of this story, the way James being trans was part of it but not the primary focus. James feeding bread to the ducks on a grotty park bench is honestly such a beautiful, persistent and soothing image, and I loved the whole story from start to finish. It’s got lovely, warm coming of age vibes to it and I felt James’ conflict and fears come through so well in the telling of this story. Wonderfully written.

#3. Of Reckoning and Ruin by @half-light-01

Severus Snape, Albus Dumbledore | 10,585

"And it is the eternal rule that drops of blood spilled on the ground demand yet more blood." 

One year after Lily Potter's death, Severus Snape's Dark Mark comes to life. Caught between a creature that wants him dead, and a Headmaster who needs him alive, the young Hogwarts professor is forced to reckon with his past and negotiate his future.

My Rec: I discovered this terrific fic at the end of this year and boy oh boy am I glad I did. The relationship between Severus and Albus is, in my view, one of the most complex and fascinating of the Harry Potter series. This story explores the darker sides we see of Dumbledore in canon through his interactions with Snape, but most of all it is a complex and fascinating character study of Severus, his grief, his guilt, his inner turmoil. The author really gets into the grit of both characters without flinching away from it and the creature in the story gives it a very unsettling quality which forces us to question who can be trusted, if anyone. A really engaging, well told story with a deft handling of complex characters. 

#4. my heart beat a tattoo on my ribs by @candybarrnerd / icarusinflight

Ginny Weasley/Luna Lovegood | 7,403

Ginny can't understand why anyone would want to mark themselves by choice but she still agrees to go with Harry when he says he wants a tattoo.

My Rec: I loved this beautiful story of tattoo artist Luna and a Ginny still processing the trauma and grief of war. The friendship between Ginny and Harry is wonderfully crafted and the dull ache of grief that grips Ginny is beautifully handled - it’s softly done and never overwrought and the story is ultimately one of healing and hope. A really terrific, sexy read and one I’ll definitely return to again.

#5. Distortion by DorthyAnn (JenniferMarie)

Harry Potter Centric (see AO3 for more detail) | 8,924

Harry wakes in darkness. A darkness that goes on and on without end. He can’t see or feel, he doesn’t know what’s happened. All he can do is hold on, replaying his memories to keep him sane. Until it’s over. Until he can go home again.

My Rec: This is horror as I love it the most. A strange, unsettling, superbly written story which grapples with identity, perception of self, loss of identity and evokes a creepy, oppressive sense of things going horribly awry. The Potterverse is so rich with details of magic and potions which can be used to alter ones own perception of themselves and the rest of the world, and the author uses the magic of canon in a deft and eerie way to create a gripping, unnerving tale of psychological horror. 

#6. Soft Touch by perverse_idyll

Severus Snape/Harry Potter | 15,167

Harry's love life has been dismal, and he finds himself checking into a therapeutic massage clinic just to get off - the same clinic to which Snape had been delivered three years earlier for physical therapy.

My Rec: Perverse Idyll is one of those authors whose fics I read and they stay with me for a long time after. One of the first Snarry authors I properly discovered on the journals, Perverse Idyll and I see Snape somewhat differently at times (although the meta conversations that results in are always an absolute privilege and pleasure) but I think that’s one of the things I find so compelling whenever I read PI’s fic. Perverse Idyll takes Snape to places I struggle to as a writer, and I find him absolutely captivating. He never loses his sharpness, his bitterness or his moral ambiguity and there is nothing more compelling than reading an unapologetically brittle Snape from the deft hand of a terrific writer who knows the character inside out and has formed deep, intricate views about his complexities and motivations and lets all his flaws sing instead of silencing or softening them in an attempt to make him more palatable. This is such an electric, sensual, sexy story with tension ramped up to the max. Brilliant.

#7. Rooftop Ruminations by @thealmostrhetoricalquestion​

Pansy Parkinson/Ginny Weasley | 12,209

Ginny barely registered the evening. The musician, whose bow wrung sounds from the strings with a casual, carefree elegance that Ginny would have usually envied, was just a blur in front of her face. The steps she took to the Rialto Bridge once everyone was ready felt too light and airy, and Luna’s hand in hers was just a wisp of citrus-scented silk. The night grew cooler and Ginny didn’t feel it. Simpering crush, Daphne had said. Pansy had a simpering crush. The words bobbed to the surface of her thoughts and pinched at her wrists and looped around her ears. She kept glancing at Pansy in her velvet skirt and towering heels, and she kept not knowing what to feel.

She wasn’t sure who she wanted Pansy’s crush to be on, and she hated that she didn’t know.

My Rec: This is such a gorgeous piece of writing. The scene setting is so immersive and wistful somehow, there’s a quietness to the pace of the story and the telling of it that made it such a wonderful read. I found myself completely engaged by the unfolding of the story, the richness of the details and descriptions sprinkled throughout, the handling of Ginny’s grief, the sparks and flickers of her feelings as she explores her growing attraction to Pansy and past feelings for Luna. I highly recommend this beautifully told story. 

#8. The Frame by mindabbles

Sirius Black/James Sirius Potter | 11,703

What are the ethical implications of falling for a person you're named after? How about the logistical complications of falling for someone who shouldn’t be alive? James would rather, he finds, not look too closely at either, not when Sirius makes him forget anyone else exists. 

My Rec: I left a prompt for Next Gen Fest involving time travel and James Sirius meeting his namesake and I was so excited when I saw it had been claimed. This fic was absolutely terrific. The idea of the portrait / painting being suspended on the wall mirrors this moment of James Sirius and Sirius suspended in time and I love that the author chose to end the story when they did, leaving things open and ambiguous but in a way that still felt very satisfying. Sirius and James are brilliantly characterised and there are wonderful doses of humour throughout what is a fairly tragic premise. The sex is hot enough to burn and the story has a gentle hopefulness which left me feeling really warm and content, despite the openness of the ending. We see James Sirius and Sirius in this one, suspended moment, as one might view a painting or photograph. Brilliantly written, with nods to Jeddy and Wolfstar too. I loved it.

#9. Games People Play by kelly_chambliss

Minerva McGonagall/Severus Snape | 5,610

Life is not easy when you are Severus Snape or Remus Lupin. But sometimes, there are compensations. 

My Rec:  I fell in love with this fic when it posted anon and for this year’s HP Crossgenfest and I wasn’t surprised when the author was revealed to be the immensely talented Kelly, one of my favourite writers of the older women in the Potterverse with a brilliant grasp of Minerva and Severus as characters. The story weaves Remus into the narrative and as ever Kelly’s prose is delightful, the use of second person working particularly well for this story with its shifting POVs. Severus displays moments of his surly, jealous, childish self but also appears a much reformed man although Kelly expertly retains a level of ambiguity around his true motivations in a fully-fleshed out, rich story of human complexity and the ways in which our past informs our perception of the present. If you only ever read one author writing Minerva McGonagall again, read Kelly. Although we are in the heads of Remus and Severus, it is smart, perceptive Minerva who is the star of the show. Wonderful. 

#10. Summer’s End by Barry_Manilows_Wardrobe

Albus Dumbledore/Gellert Grindelwald | 9,505

Gellert was the embodiment of summer: sunlit hair, warm skin beneath Albus's hands, and a smile that made Albus feel hot down to his very bones. But all summers must come to an end. 

My Rec: This story is utterly breathtaking. The writing is so confident and rich and the characters and their doomed love beautifully rendered. I read the fic with a lump in my throat, a gorgeously angsty, evocative tale of loving too much, too young, of powerful, intelligent wizards losing themselves in one another and the heat of an irrevocable passion which pulls them towards one another before everything breaks apart. At times the writing is so lyrical and poetic, I had to go back and read several phrases over and over, to really take them in. An absolutely stunning tale of lost love and the path that his past sets Albus on as he sets about preparing Harry for his future trials. Captivating, from start to finish. 

[animeraider]

I want to talk to you a moment about fear.

I wrote this a couple of weeks ago, and then just as I was about to publish it we had a slew of mass shootings, including one in my own geographical back yard, at a festival I've attended with my family. It seems to me that being afraid of gun violence is the one exception to my entire essay, and it does poke a big hole in it. We can't be afraid to close that hole. So here is that essay. +++++++++++++++++++++ I have said for a very long time now that the only useful place for fear in on Rollercoasters. Maybe horror movies. That it. Nothing else. But I want to dig deeper on that theme for a moment, if you don’t mind.

For getting on close to 2 decades now, there has been a political party in this country that has wanted you to be afraid. Usually it’s to be afraid of Muslims, terrorists, foreigner… anything other. They want you to believe that crime is getting worse. They want you to believe the country is financially unstable. They want you to believe there is a gay agenda that will change your life for the worse. A Trans-gender agenda. An Atheist agenda. A war on Christmas. Fear of packages in the mail. Fear of people in black communities, with their high crime rates. Fear of immigrants and the crime they bring. Fear of cartels and gangs that don’t even have a presence in this country. Fear of the Deficit. Fear that higher taxes will kill the economy. Fear that Iran is building an atomic bomb. Fear that the government will take over your healthcare. Fear that the government will take your guns. Fear that the government will take your freedoms.

This really ramped up after 9/11. I won’t kid you, that was awful. Grotesque. I can remember every damned moment of it – feeling genuinely in shock but being brave for my children, who were frightened out of their wits. Grabbing my children from their schools. Picking up my wife from her teaching job and the protocols that say that teachers needs to stay at their posts can go fuck themselves. Hunkering down and wishing it were all over. Thinking about the flight originally bound by my adopted hometown, and our own skyscrapers. It was awful and it opened a horrific wound.

Thing is, when do we get to heal? Why do we need to stay afraid? How can we possibly heal if we’re still afraid?

I’m asking that all of you please, stop being afraid. We’re not the greatest country in the world anymore but we sure used to be. We dreamed big, accomplished even bigger, and created the world’s next great adventures. We don’t do that anymore.

Fear is holding us back. Fear of the other. Fear of the world and how different it is from us. Yeah, we got hurt, badly hurt, but it’s time to heal. It’s time to stop being afraid to heal. It’s not easy, and I don’t deny that. But let me offer you a few notions about fear that maybe you haven’t considered.

I’m not afraid of Muslims. They’ve been part of this country going back to its very foundation. There are more Muslims in the world than there are Americans and there always has been. 9/11 didn’t change that. We’ve been fine with Muslims. Sharia Law isn’t being introduced anywhere in this country. It’s just not. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying, and wants you afraid. If Muslims were such a big problem why are we as a nation so damned friendly with Saudi Arabia? Senegal? Pakistan? Morocco? Singapore? Egypt? Kuwait? Morocco – the first country to recognize the United States as an independent country (1786), and with whom we maintain the longest single treaty in US History?

A Muslim named Fazlur Tahman Khan (an American) invented the engineering system that allows skyscrapers to be built, including the Twin Towers, Sears Tower in Chicago and even the Trump International Hotel and Tower in the same city. He also built the Metrodome. A Muslim named Ernest Hamwi invented the Ice Cream Cone at the 1904 World’s Fair (Martha Stewart has published his original recipe too).

I’m not afraid of terrorists. I actually know someone who died on 9/11 and I completely understand the anger, the fear. I’ve felt it. It’s a physical thing you can feel and touch. But you know what? The country seems to have learned its lesson about how to anticipate this sort of thing. I’d like to think we can relax now. There are people whose jobs are to be vigilant and they’ve been successful since that awful day 2 decades ago. I think we can relax. And if I’m wrong? What’s the point of dying scared? Laugh at death – it’s going to laugh back. Don’t take life so seriously, it was never meant to be permanent.

I prefer to think of them simply as criminals. In addition to not being afraid, don’t make them important.

I’m not afraid of foreigners. I want to see the world, and see the differences and the similarities in other cultures. I want them to be our partners on this pale blue dot. Being afraid of the rest of the world seems just so… lonely. We’re not built for lonely. You’re here, reading this right now, aren’t you? Lonely makes people into monsters thanks to the echo chamber that is our own brains and we must be better than that.

I’m not afraid of crime. Despite all the crime shows on television, cable and podcast crime is actually way down, and is trending down. Even the FBI says so. I’m not afraid of the country being financially unstable. Yes, we have good days and bad days but overall the country is still the largest economy on the planet and will continue to be for a long time unless we intentionally intervene to make it worse. We have safety nets we didn’t use to have. Social Security isn’t going broke. Nowhere close. We have plenty of money. It does, however, need a slight adjustment in who is holding on to it.

I’m not afraid of gays. For the most part, every gay person, every Trans person I have ever met has wanted only one thing – for everyone else to not care that they’re gay or trans. Or anywhere else on the non-binary spectrum. It doesn’t affect you in any way whatsoever. The LGBTQA agenda in schools? Mostly it teaches that it doesn’t matter. Can you stop being afraid of this? Yeah, some religions say that this is a sin but can you stop being afraid of it long enough to take to heart one great lesson in that book of yours? Even if you believe it’s a sin, you love the sinner. That’s it. Stop there. Never, never, never add hate to that. “Love the sinner, Hate the sin” isn’t in the Bible, the Koran or the Torah. Anything further isn’t religion – it’s justifying what you’re afraid of; most likely yourself.

(As a side note, for those of you who use the Bible to justify your fears of these people, I find it hilarious that you keep using the parts of the Bible written by the Romans after they co-opted Christianity. But who am I to judge?)

I’m not afraid of Atheists for the same reason. You know what they want? For everyone else to not push their own agenda on them, just like you don’t want someone else’s agenda forced on you. The Constitution is quite clear on this – no religion will be established by the state. Atheists would like you to support this very American ideal. That’s it.

There is no war on Christmas. There simply isn’t. Atheists exchange gifts too, because it’s nice to do.

I’m not afraid of packages in the mail. Yeah, there was some scary stuff sent out just after 9/11, but the number of people who got those packages/envelopes can be counted on one hand, and it isn’t your hand.

I’m not afraid of black neighborhoods. Crime really isn’t any higher in black neighborhoods than it is in white ones, not when the economics are taken into account. When people have money crime goes down, regardless of the color of one’s skin. Go to any white community where they income levels and cost of living are the same as any similar black neighborhood and you’ll find that the crime rates are just about equal. But the people trying to keep you afraid are white, and black is part of “the other”. There are good people living in those neighborhoods. Kind people. People who would help you.

Stop calling the police on black people. Stop being afraid. Be kind.

I‘m not afraid of immigrants or any crime. Yes, a couple of stories have been sensationalized, but statistically immigrants cause less crime than those of us born here. I’m not afraid of them taking our jobs. If the jobs are there and you want them, apply for them. Those jobs they’re taking are jobs you didn’t want, and they’re there. Immigrants tend to work hard, because they want what we used to be, and what they believe we can still be.

Fear of foreign gangs? Seriously? This might surprise you but MS13 members haven’t been making it across the border. You don’t find them in our detention camps. That’s because they’re not here.

Fear of the deficit? Nope, just can’t do it. Not when the political power who wants you to be afraid stops caring about it when they’re in power, and starts caring about it when they’re not. Besides, when they are it balloons, and when they’re not it decreases. Almost like they’re the cause or something.

I don’t fear higher taxes. Most people simply don’t make enough money where changes in the marginal tax rate will even touch them. Will it destroy the economy? No. The economy could change though. If money gets returned to the lower classes they’ll spend it. The economy should actually get better. The economy was great when Eisenhower was President. When Kennedy was President. We built highways. We went to the moon. You know, when taxes were higher.

Taxes, right now, are lower than they have been in your entire lifetime. Unless you’re over 90 years old.

Iran isn’t building an atomic bomb. They could, if they’re not engaged with. Obama realized this and got them to stop. I’m not afraid on Iran. But some people haven’t recovered from the wound given us in 1979 by Iran. Trump may just be one of them. His National Security Advisor certainly hasn’t.

I don’t fear the government taking over my health care. I’d kind of rather they did so, actually. My mother has Medicare and they’ve treated her better than my doctors sometimes treat me. Her healthcare also costs one hell of a lot less. If we move to a system like the one Canada has then yes, your taxes will be higher. But your healthcare costs will be lower. Much lower than how much your taxes go up. I’d say that’s a trade to not be afraid of.

I don’t fear the government taking your guns. I’d actually be quite happy if they did it but that’s a conversation for another time. It’s simply not going to happen. We do need to have an honest conversation about it though. We’ve lost too many children to guns. Come on people, we can solve this.

There is so much more that people have been trying to make us all afraid of over the past couple of decades. Much more than I could list here. Vaccines, Godless schools, Black people voting, improper birth certificates, QAnon, Impeachment… the list just goes on and on and on and on and on and on and on. I’m not afraid of any of it.

And I’m not afraid of Donald J. Trump. Or Mike Pence. Or Moscow Mitch McConnell.

I’m not afraid of anything. I’m an American. A citizen of what used to be The United States of America. I’d like you to be too.

Being afraid is downright un-American. So stop it. All of you. You can do this.

[themattress]

More bullshit from Mod A in regards to Xion.  Mod M is more reasonable (although I question if toxic male fandom does hate anything that reads like fanfiction at first glance...I think that if it reads like the kind of fanfiction they like, then they’ll eagerly accept it. I like to consider myself equal opportunity in this regard: if it reads like any kind of bad fanfic, then I dislike it.)

I’m with @riniuchihaa here. For me, Xion, far from being the best KH character, was the first glaring neon warning sign that the series was going off-course, that an original character was being created for the sake of it despite not being able to impact much of anything given her placement, and then was not ever let go of even though the excuse given as to why she was forgotten by KH2 should have rendered it impossible for her to appear in the series again.

“not a damsel in distress, action girl or sex object”

Is she not those things, though?  She has to be rescued or protected several times throughout the game. She wields a Keyblade and can even be better at it than Roxas if she’s absorbed enough of his strength. And there are a lot of creepy guys online that will argue that she is sexy, particularly with KH3′s model of her suggesting that she’s not wearing anything underneath that coat, which is open all the way to just above her chest. By KH3, she’s even taken Namine’s “plot device to make convoluted shit happen” status. If anything, people take issue with her being all of those things, and not even being them as well as other KH girls. She’s very derivative with little to add for herself.

“she’s a regular human being with a regular human emotional arc”

I would actually say that of Xion in the manga.

In the game, I think this is a case of projecting. Xion’s personality and arc are written as such a blank slate, with more people talking about Xion and what she’s going through than her and it being onscreen, that it’s easy to project on to. But when looked at objectively, there isn’t much humanity to it at all.

Ask yourself this: what is Xion like when she’s not around Roxas and Axel, doing missions and eating ice cream? What are her likes and dislikes, her own personal hobbies or aspirations? What are her feelings on matters completely unrelated to her friends?  For the life of me, I can’t come up with an answer. The closest I can get is with the text of her Secret Reports, where she honestly shows more character than she actually shows in the game itself (but then, that’s the same with Roxas and his Diary entries.) 

Before her identity crisis kicks in, all of Xion’s scenes are shared with Roxas and/or Axel, in the context of missions, ice cream, and being good friends with them, simply going along with whatever they’re doing and saying. Any feelings of inadequacy she feels during periods of time where she’s “malfunctioning” are skimmed over, and again is talked about more by other people than by her. Once her identity crisis happens, any scene she has apart from Axel and Roxas either still works them in somehow (they are consistently her biggest motivations in her own personal conflict, the only reason she’s conflicted about her existence is because of them since they give her a reason to exist) or just focuses on her freaking out about the fact that she’s a replica whose personality was formed based on the fragmented memories of another person that leaked into Xion through that person’s Nobody, which makes her less fit to exist than those who aren’t meant to exist. Yeah, totally a regular human emotional arc right there!  Can’t count the number of times in the history of the human species that people have had to go through that!

Kairi in KH and Namine in COM actually felt like human beings with emotional arcs in spite of their extraordinary circumstances. Xion feels more like KH2′s Kairi and Namine, where I get the basic trope behind their personalities and development, but can’t really pin them down as three-dimensional and realistic. That’s Xion - the writing for her is very trope-y, not human. The main points of how she was written were three-fold: as a plot device (a means of getting Roxas from point A to point B), as a wish-fulfillment character (she’s basically Tomoko Kanemaki’s self-insert), and as an exploration of a theme (the “What Measure is a Non-Human?” theme that Kanemaki is obsessed with). The humanity being inferred in regards to her being a trans girl case study was not at all intended to be there, and it can only happen because she was sketched thinly enough for it to be applied to her. 

“complains that she’s taking too much space or stealing the spotlight”

I’m sorry, but this is a valid complaint. When it was announced there was going to be a game about Organization XIII set between COM and KH2, everyone was wanting and expecting more development and focus on the members who had already been firmly established, most of whom were in desperate need of such development and focus. So to suddenly have Xion introduced and be the major focus of the game, whether she’s actually on-screen or not, would be very jarring and disappointing. 

What’s worse is all the games she pops in after Days, as not only does it destroy the established rules of canon in regards to her fate, but she ultimately steals the spotlight in an even more harmful way in KH3: Kairi, the original KH girl, who had been receiving build-up for YEARS as a Keyblade-wielding Guardian of Light, is literally screwed out of this role in favor of Xion, her Mary Sue copycat whom no-one asked for to begin with and whom many people weren’t keen on having return, as not only did it destroy the main thing she had going for her (her nature as a tragic character) but it robbed Kairi of development and focus that, again, she was in desperate need of. But Xion got over 30 more votes than Kairi in a Japanese popularity poll, so...priorities?

“Xion’s story is about the right to define her own existence, to live as her own true self, etc.”

No, that’s not what Xion’s story was about. It was about her learning that she had no right to her existence because it was actively hurting the existences of others, including her best friends’, and that the right thing to do is to disappear. I take some issue with how it played out (mainly that Xion accepts this way too easily and becomes a “Too Good For This Sinful Earth” type who does the right thing for the sake of her friends even when a more angry, selfish and conflicted Xion would’ve been more engaging and human, and that Riku is OOC in his treatment of her considering his treatment of Roxas), it was still incredibly tragic and it owned that. So for that tragic story to be undone in favor of a “lol, just kidding, Xion can exist and get a happy ending with her friends after all, no tragedy here!” way of appeasing the fans who called foul and raised a stink about it (especially in Japan) will never sit right with me, especially when the writing doesn’t even TRY to justify it. It just happens for the sake of it.

“It has a lot to do with the fact that Xion is a young girl whose story expects us to genuinely empathize with her”

OK, here’s a tip: it is rarely EVER a good idea to expect your audience to all feel a certain way toward something and try to force that reaction. “Death of the Author” is a thing, which is why you’re best not taking sides or playing favorites when making a story, you’re better off putting your personal feelings aside and just letting things play out, allowing people in the audience to make up their own mind. When the story pushes for the audience to genuinely empathize with Xion, with lines by others such as “poor Xion!”, then it’s not surprising that the opposite effect happens: some fans don’t like or empathize with her because they resent the hamfisted attempts at being told that they should. 

“That’s like saying Kairi didn’t matter in KH1 because Sora forgot her in COM”

That’s a false equivalence if I ever saw one. KH came out before COM, and Sora didn’t forget her so much as she was replaced by someone else, Namine, in his memory, which drove that story’s conflict. Its resolution was Sora learning the truth and remembering Kairi again. Kairi is still a factor in COM, a very important factor at that. Days came out after KH2, where there isn’t even a hint of Xion, she is not a factor in that game because she wasn’t invented yet. Sure, Xion matters to Days, but that mattering doesn’t feel like it amounts to much when she isn’t seen, heard from or mentioned for the entirety of the game it was leading up to.

“But so what?”

So, it feels incredibly unnatural to have a character jammed into a pre-existing timeframe and pre-existing dynamic prior to KH2, with mass amnesia being used as a plot device to explain away why she wasn’t present in any way in KH2, only for every game taking place after KH2 (and thus after Days was made) to suddenly start featuring Xion again, with the mass amnesia plot device being casually discarded. What’s worse is how canon rules were obliterated so that Xion could return in KH3 and reverse the tragedy element that made her story effective to begin with, at the expense of characters like Kairi who have been around longer than Xion and who desperately needed exposure more than Xion. Seriously, in addition to the point I already raised about Xion taking Kairi’s place, just think about this: characters that were created as a trio, Sora, Riku and Kairi, are no longer a trio, just the duo of Sora and Riku, while characters that were created as a duo, Roxas and Axel, are now a trio thanks to Xion. It feels like a slap in the face to all the fans who liked Kairi and the Destiny Trio, and it’s a big reason as to why Xion’s inclusion in the series feels like a mistake to those fans and thus why she’s such an off-putting character to them.

The only statements made here that I agree with is that Xion sadly wouldn’t have gotten as much hate if she was a badass, older male character, that her being forgotten due to memory magic isn’t really a mark against her since that’s a cheap plot device that happens to a lot of characters in the series, and that you can’t really do the story of 358/2 Days without her since she’s so integral to it...but on that note, the story of 358/2 Days didn’t need to happen. The KH series during its early days was meant to be Sora, Donald and Goofy’s story, so leaving the period of time where they were asleep a blank made perfect sense. We never needed to know about Roxas’ time in the Organization beyond what was said and shown in KH2, and to this day I honestly wish we hadn’t.  In game form, anyway. The manga is great, it can stay!

[carstairsdaily]

Lord of Shadows Review & Analysis! SPOILERS AHEAD, READ AT YOUR OWN RISK

On another note about spoilers, I get that seeking out spoilers as well as snippets, are a product of waiting so long for the next book… but I don’t know that I will treat them the same way going into QOAAD because I almost felt, while reading, that I had read 35% of the book already! I can’t promise that I won’t seek out spoilers or snippets, but I do hope that less are released over the next two years (I know that sounds ridiculous, but I would prefer a surprise!) With Regards to Individual Characters: • Emma: a feminist badass, growing into being the best shadowhunter of her time but not there yet. Her sarcasm and skill has improved since LM, and I literally laughed out loud during her POV’s and while reading her quotes. The scene with her and Diego and the fire ants= pure gold. Her scene with Manuel and calling out the cohort for being fascists= pure gold. • Julian: a sweetheart and I want to cry thinking about how much he has been through. I know “Dark Julian” has been referenced several times throughout the fandom but I really didn’t see too much of a change until- actually- the steamy scene with Emma where he demands that she calls him only Julian. Very sexy, very dark too. • Cristina: deserves better and I am dying for more of her POV’s. I am always amazed by her class and maturity. • Diego: not perfect. I am mad at him. • Kit: surprisingly likeable. I am so glad they included POV’s with him and Jace!! • Livia: underrated as hell, so sweet, so caring, so selfless, her charm and sarcasm= gold. • Ty: I AM SO GLAD WE ARE FINALLY STARTING TO SEE T Y B L A C K T H O R N AND HIS TRUE SELF-A M E N. • Dru- her crush on Jaime is fitting for a first crush and I’m glad he gave her the confidence to speak up. I want to hug her literally all the time. • Tavvy- irrelevant but cute. SHIPS: • I surprisingly loved Mark and Emma’s dynamic. Their relationship reminded me of a mundane high school sweetheart kind of relationship, because you can tell they absolutely care about each other, I just don’t see them as anything more than a bromance. I will however agree with the sentiment, "maybe in another life" because maybe, in another series, in another world, they would have been perfect for each other. • Kieran/Mark/Cristina: I find it significant that no choices were made in terms of canon relationships, which I interpret as a canon friendship because if any of them were going to be romantically involved, a decision would be made by now. I enjoy the friendship they have, I surprisingly forgave Kieran, but I do not expect any of the Blackthorns or Emma to forgive him also. His actions in QOAAD will definitely define how I feel about him going forward. • JEMMA: You all know I am 100% a Jemma shipper, but this time around I was glad that their relationship did not overshadow the rest of the book. I liked how private their relationship was, which is a funny word to use because people become more privy to it in LOS and because it was extremely private in LM, but the fact that they were literally in a different part of their country on their own made me all happy. • I am also glad that I got the B&N copy with the extra scene, which I waited to read because it is right after the ending of the book and I did not want to read anything after finishing LOS, lol. • Kitty: No canon romantic relationship yet, still very cute scenes… Ill talk about this in theories. • Kit/Livia: I am glad that Livvy’s first kiss was Kit, and not some random boy who won’t treasure the memory or look back and think “oh she was sweet, it’s a shame what happened to her”. Kit will always treasure the fact that he was Livia’s first kiss, and will cherish the friendship he had with her. It was platonic, but still special. I know people on tumblr were upset with this but I hope by the end of the book they understood. PROFOUND THINGS IN LOS • Lets talk about the fact that Emma Carstairs literally doesn’t cry….. but she cried over Julian literally 400 times in Lord of Shadows. If that doesn’t show you how much she literally loves that boy idk what will. • CLARY SHIPS JEMMA. During their conversation Clary literally says “who I pictured you with [not Mark or Cameron] doesn’t make sense….” This goes back to my question to CC about whether or not Simon knows about Jules and Emma, since he noticed something off during the parabatai ceremony. She responded “he knows something, he just doesn’t know what he knows”. I think the same applies to Clary, maybe she has even had premonitions about it, and that is so so significant. #jemmaisendgame • Kit and Livia and Ty’s friendship: so sweet and pure and is literally the reason why Kit decides to stay. How will Ty and Kit function without their third musketeer? • DRU & JAIME: Thank you Jaime for giving Dru the confidence to confront her family over her role as a Shadowhunter… but the witchlight you left behind that literally portals to another dimension: WTF? WHO IS ASH????? That scene is messed up because it is so short and therefore, subconsciously everyone looks over it because of how chaotic everything else is. I can’t help but feel like this is going to play a MASSIVE role in QOAAD. • Diana & Gwyn: Thank you CC for trans representation and a beautiful story. The fact that Gwyn accepts her wholeheartedly made my chest ache, and I hope that no one will use it against her please please please. • Jules & Emma’s Decision to tell the Inquisitor: Not sure why they did this tbh, but now that Robert is dead, what are their options??? Did he mark it down somewhere? Will they become so irrational that they consider the Seelie Queen’s offer? Livia’s Death • Months ago I received an anon message from someone about Livvy, which literally said that they felt something was going to happen to her and I completely dismissed it…. Thinking we haven’t seen enough of her storyline yet and it was too soon. I AM SO SORRY, and it’s literally all I have been thinking about for days. • Livia was so so selfless, down to her core, the last moments of her life were spent trying to save the people she loves. • I discussed with a mutual that the fact that Annabel did it was both cruel and also extremely fitting. • When you think about it, Livvy was the 21st century version of Annabel. From their appearance, which was remarkably similar, to the way that they treated outsiders taking refuge in their family (Livvy with Kit, Annabel with Malcolm) down to their deaths, both innocents killed trying to protect the ones they love. • The fact that the Mortal Sword shattered to me symbolized the end of the truth and trust within the Clave. • The amount of guilt that each character will carry following these deaths is heartbreaking… • i sincerely hope her death is not tossed to the side, discussed for 150 pages then only mentioned 4-5 times after that because she deserved better, the entire Blackthorn family did, and peace was completely ripped away from them Which brings me to my first theory: I believe there was a reason that Jessamine was introduced to TDA, not only to highlight Kit’s Herondale-ness, but also as a foreshadowing of another character who is not at peace, feels that there is unfinished business, and a group of people needing to be protected: Livia. Because it was made clear in the book that necromancy and raising the dead is forbidden, and because QOAAD takes place a week later, Livvy’s chances of being raised are very very very slim. I sincerely believe that she will come back, but not to life. It would be fitting of her to come back as a ghost (not at first but definitely later in the story) and for her to protect her family, and give Kit and Ty the OK to do whatever they want to do (whether its be a couple or become parabatai, or go to the Scholomance) More theories: • Though I predict a dark Julian, I do not predict a dark/irredeemable Julian, who digs himself into such a big hole that he can’t climb out of it. Remember he has two anchors: his family, and Emma… • The Rosales brothers, especially with their plans to overthrow the Cohort and fool Zara are going to play a massive role in QOAAD. • I think that Jemma are going to have to confide in Jem and Tessa, and they will end up helping Jules and Emma with the parabatai curse. I am also sure they will play a big role in the next book. • Unpopular Opinion: I do not think Clary will die. I know she thinks she will, but CC did say QOAAD is lighter (in regards to themes) than LOS, and I just do not think it would be a lighter book if Clary, a significant character, dies. I think she will become close to death, and people will become concerned, then she will tell Jace of her fears and say yes to his proposal. However, I could very well be wrong!! •i do predict the Cohort being in power for a short amount of time….. because they represent members of our society, I do not think they will be shut down so easily because that’s not realistic. Despite this, hope and love always win. I trust that this will remain true in the next book. • I do predict the end of the Cold Peace, it was never ever a good idea and no one likes it. • I predict that Drusilla will be a hero, now that her older sister has passed away and she has finally decided to step up as a Shadowhunter, I do not doubt that the role she plays will be significant, it just seems to be a reasonable underdog story. • Kitty: parabatai or lovers? An important decision, because Kit does reference his thoughts about being parabatai with Ty, and Ty finally says yes to being parabatai with Livvy. I think it’s a possible “that’s what Livvy would have wanted” trope, but I could also be wrong and think its about as equal of a chance of them becoming lovers. • Who will the new head of the LA Institute be? I sincerely doubt it will go to someone the Blackthorns do not know or trust. They have had so much taken from them, the Institute does not deserve to go next. Possibly Cristina? Will Jules or Emma be of age? Jem or Tessa following the end of the Cold Peace? We have to see! • ASH… I am just frustrated that we do not know more about him… I don’t even have a theory I just needed an excuse to talk about him again. Questions and Theories from my mutuals!!!!! • Anonymous: Its 3 am and I am literally just crying on my bed because of the book. ​ >> Relatable!! I cried hours after I finished because I was so sad. The ending really got me! • Anonymous: Do you think Jaime and Dru are endgame? She is 13 and hes like 17 but he thinks she’s 16. Idk, they seem to have a nice friendship but not a romantic relationship in my opinion.. ​ >> Agreed! I honestly think CC included this first crush idea as a way of introducing Dru’s further character development, not necessarily to introduce them as a couple… But also think about Cecily and Gabriel!!! They were about the same ages at the time, even though that was a different time period… anything is possible, but I do not ship them romantically! • VirginaNewman: I loved LOS, however I was indeed disappointed that Helen + Aline make a debut in the LAST chapter! ​ >> I definitely thought Helen and Aline would play a larger role in LOS, they were barely mentioned, barely had any scenes… I was disappointed by their small role too, but I am interested to see how hard they fight to stay in the next book. Ps- the scene where Aline basically tells Zara to shut her fucking mouth is GOLD. • Betweenshadesoftessagray- Since Robert’s dead, its going to be a race to get that spot, with probably Zara’s father trying to become Inquisior. And since Robert was the one who could help Emma and Julian with the exile thing, they really don’t know what to do with it. I think the powers will continue to grow, and since I think the main battle of QOAAd is going to be a battle where the warlocks and nephilim cannot use their runes/warlock magic, maybe their parabatai magic will still work and that’s how they win. I have already stated that I think there is going to be a battle in QOAAD without being able to use rune magic and the warlocks not being able to use their magic, but this didn’t fit in my other ask I just realized something that made my theory more solid: in the beginning, Zara says she went to Hungary because they were claiming their weapons were not working and she said it was incompetence, so the blight is already spreading not only in Idris but everywhere else. ​ >> This is such a well thought out theory and I wish I could give a formal response but I definitely need to go back, reread, and analyze this… I didn’t even realize the significance of Shadowhunters and warlocks including Magnus losing their powers!! Wow! Is this because of the Black Volume? I definitely think Emma and Julian’s parabatai/love powers will play a huge role in QOAAD and maybe even save the day during this second Dark War. Maybe that’s how they will become heros, their bond will be broken as a reward or something and everyone can live happier ever after? AHH! • Share your theories and thoughts in the comments below or inbox me (not on Anon so I can respond privately!!!)

[crazyfangarlady]

Sildy I know like little of the windy son I drew for you please ramble about him to me 💙 also how's the green bean

my boy my man my love ZACH I’m calling it right now this is going to take me the night if I don’t try to keep it short.

Imiel is doing good!! Kind of in a lore pause while he waits for his boss’s new dragon to be born. Jeez, Ono.

nOW for proper rambles under the cut~

Most of that can probably already be found in his tag on my blog, but honestly I don’t even remember what’s in there anymore or how accurate it is. Though it’s probably still mostly good, if you wanna check it out for details I might skip here~(sidenote: after checking out his tag myself I realized there are interactions with some people you do Not like in there so. While the info is good and there is no connected lore, be wary some not-nice names are included. ;v;)

I am tORN though because there’s this huge shift between how he’s been for most of the time I had him and his current state due to Recent Lore Happenings. So whiCH ZACH DO I TALK ABOUT?? …the answer is probably to start from the beginning. More rambles for your soul. This will be too long and I am slightly sorry

Zach’s a wind mage, and part of my pirate crew, as the helmsdragon - basically, he makes the ship fly, up to creating artificial winds when needed to steer it where they want to go. That’s basically all he does- he doesn’t even take part in any of the the fighting or plundering (when the rest of the crew’s busy doing That, he’s still flying the airship). Our man doesn’t much like fighting, you see.

…which might sound weird coming from a pirate, but he’s not always been one. It’s quite a recent thing, even. He was born to a family of very rich merchants from the Cloudsong, and lived most of his life basically free from trouble. Good living environment, a family that loved him more than anything - he has a twin sister, named Adara, and they grew up real close. Best sibs.

The only thing that sets him apart from the rest of his fam is his proficiency at magic. And the man is crazy good at it. It’s innate. Heck, he could make things around him and himself as well fly before he even knew how to walk or how to speak. He was quite a handful as a child. Thankfully he was well-behaved.His parents tried to hire confirmed mages to teach him to make the best out of his powers, but it???? didn’t yield anything. Mostly because he didn’t understand the methods they wanted him to apply, and also because he didn’t want to try much… So he just kept on going with whatever he could do on his own, and not much understanding why or how it worked. Why would he?? It felt more natural to him than so many other things that were already effortless. 

(People who know his powers like to joke that to be this talented, he must be the windsinger’s own son. But they’re not that far from the truth… His sister was an only egg, and a fragile one- the others had been created lifeless. Their parents prayed to the Windsinger that she’d live, and Winddad heard them. He also heard how sad they were that their other eggs did not live, and so he was like. “Yknow what, I’m gonna do y’all a favor”, and while strengthening Adara’s own egg, created a perfect copy of it from his own magic, out of which Zach would be born.)(An identical copy of his sister, created from pure magic, by his god’s own hands. Come on, he’s made of the stuff, of course it’d flow naturally to him.)

ANYWAY. Sadly, good times have an end, he has to end up on that pirate ship somehow.

See, his family’s business was well-established, making lot of money and all. But some people didn’t like that, or certain new decisions they’d made. And one rousing scandal and some carefully planted ‘evidence’ later, their name was that of traitors, and the heads of the family, imprisoned. So our man Zach, who’d been enjoying life half doing his own thing, half helping out with said business, found himself homeless, money-less, and with everyone he used to know turning his back on him, either believing the lies or not wanting to associate with him to save face. 

I think he left the Cloudsong for a little while, maybe went to his sister’s… But eventually he came back, because it was all that he knew. Maybe to see if things had changed? He’s a stubborn one. Well, they had not, and he ended up finishing his day in some random tavern in the not-so-well-frequented area. By which I mean, most of the patrons being outlaws of some sort. The only place where people would serve him anymore without at least a handful of people giving him weird looks.

That’s where he happened upon my pirate crew, and most specifically its captain, Eydis. They’d met once before, but in very different circumstances (still good though). But all that Eyds remembered basically boiled down to “this guy is a good mage, and I need a new one of those, hEY GUY OVER THERE WANNA WORK FOR ME?”

(She’s not very subtle)

(And he was kind of in a reckless mood so he was like “A friendly face? Sign me up”)(…he just did not remember that she was a pirate. Only that he didn’t associate any negative things with her, and in that moment, that was all he needed.)(...he still has trouble explaining his reasoning from back then now. If someone asks him, he say he just followed his instinct- maybe it was a little push of fate? But hey, things turned out for the better!)

So he became a member of my pirate crew. Befriended most everyone quite easily, tbh, he’s a very sympathetic guy, and a very valuable asset to the crew too. Things went so well he ended up falling in love with Eydis, they even had some kids... At some point down the line my man Cenric comes back to the crew too, falls hard for Zach, who also loves him quite a lot, and Eydis is like “if you don’t both confess I will personally make this happen” and now they’re dating too. Its generally just Chill for a good, long time period. Happiness up on a (pirate) airship.

THEN Carver, his son, happens to die. That’s hard blow #1. He kind of bottles it up, because he’s not good at dealing with things and if he just stays positive he can do as if nothing happened, right? right??TheN, within only a few months, some heck happens over with his other two children. That’s hard blow #2. This one is a little harder to shake off. On top of Carver’s death, the emotional toll becomes kind of heavy. He’s having a bit of trouble right now tbh, not to mention that Eyds is not doing her best either- and with their captain in a bad spot, the entire crew can feel it. That’s two of their most energetic people down. The mood is just Not That Great..

AND THEN more stuff happens but this is hella long so imma cut it there bc it is Not Official Yet (and once it is it’ll probs come out in a pseudo-update that’s just Bad Writing: Discord Update Edition bc i Cannot Hecking Write)

BUT!!!!! Some Bulletpoint Zach Facts for you still, in no particular order:

When I say he was born an identical copy of his sister aside from the magic powers, I mean it. He’s a trans man~

He “befriended” a Crowned Roc once. Which is to say, it tolerates him. He gets to ried on its back sometimes. By sitting on it and keeping himself stable with magic. 

Said Roc is the one he got almost all his Windbound feathers from. Blessed them himself. In my lore, they are good luck charms and magic catalysts popular among wind flight mages

I’d talk about his approach to magic more but I found some posts instead

The jade jewelry he wears means a lot to him, and he gifted some to both his SOs, so have some very short things I wrote about those bc im a sappy shit

He almost never sleeps full nights, instead taking several short naps throughout the day. It takes a little while for other people to get used to it.

He’s, as of now, probably the most powerful dragon of my lair. And he doesn’t even realize it. This man is all potential... but almost only that.

He loves his family so much it is literally The Most Important thing to him ever. Family goes before anything else

His hair looks so ridiculously good all the time, he takes good care of it. He enjoys doing other people’s hair, too

He can’t fight to save his life

He’s almost killed a man once, though. Without even lifting a finger. I’ll need to tell that story someday. It was terrifying.

I’m cutting his hair off in future lore. It will be missed.

I love him so much but don’t do enough with him and also it’s sUPER LATE so I might stop here?

Oh wait look its theme songs time

That’s all I think?

If you have any more questions feel free to ask

Thank you so much for reading QvQ ♥

[illustir]

Highlights for Neoreaction a Basilisk

Angela Nagle’s appalling Kill All Normies, which takes the jaw-droppingly foolish methodology of simply reporting all of the alt-right’s self-justifications as self-evident truths so as to conclude that the real reason neo-nazis have been sweeping into power is because we’re too tolerant of trans people.

This brings us to our second relatively uninteresting question, which is what to do about the alt-right. In this case the answer is even easier and more obvious than the first: you smash their bases of power, with violent resistance if necessary. If you want a more general solution that also takes care of the factors that led to a bunch of idiot racists being emboldened in the first place you drag all the billionaires out of their houses and put their heads on spikes.

The lethal meme, known as Roko’s Basilisk, used the peculiarities of Yudkowskian thought to posit a future AI that would condemn to eternal torture everyone from the present who had ever imagined it if they subsequently failed to do whatever they could to bring about its existence.

I want to be clear, with all possible sincerity, that I love the braggadocio here. I want what he is selling. Yes, Mencius, savagely tear away the veil of lies with which I cope with the abject horror that is reality and reveal to me the awful, agonizing truth of being. Give me the red pill. The problem is, once we get our golf ball-sized reality distortion pill home, put on some Laibach, and settle in for an epic bout of Thanatosian psychedelia, we discover the unfortunate truth: we’re actually just huffing paint in an unhygienic gas station bathroom. Jesus, this isn’t even bat country.

By “crap,” of course, I do not mean “wrong.” Rather, I mean obvious, in the sense of sounding like the guy at the bar watching the news (probably Fox) and muttering about how “they’re all a bunch of crooks.” Liberal democracy a hopelessly inadequate and doomed system preserved by a system of continual indoctrination? You don’t say.

And this really is stunningly weird in the context of all his red pill rhetoric about the corrupt horrors of liberal democracy. Because while there are a great many obvious critiques of contemporary society, “there’s just not enough respect for profit” really doesn’t feel like one of them.

With this, we have a genuinely tricky moment, simply because of the sheer and unbridled number of unexamined assumptions going on here.

But all the same, if you’re going to talk about suppressed ideologies that oppose the interests of entrenched power, you’ve really got to talk about the original red pill: Marxism.

It is tempting to suggest that Moldbug is a failed Marxist in the sense that Jupiter is a failed star, its mass falling tantalizingly short of the tipping point whereby nuclear fusion begins. Over and over again, Moldbug asks questions much like those that Marx asked, and his answers begin with many of the same initial observations. But inevitably, a few steps in, he makes some ridiculously broad generalization or fails to consider some obvious alternative possibility, and the train of thought fizzles into characteristic idiocy.

This sort of “the world can be saved if only everyone listens to me” narcissism belongs in the genre of fiction, where it can accomplish something, and not in the visionary manifesto, where it only reveals its own impotence.

That is not to say they can get away with being wrong, at least not straightforwardly so, but it is to reiterate that the key problem with Moldbug, Yudkowsky, and Land is that they are in key regards uninteresting—that they offer dull and unsatisfying answers to their most compelling questions, of which “hang out with a bunch of racist nerdbros” is merely the worst.

Terence McKenna’s suggestion that DMT is an alien intelligence’s attempt to communicate directly with the human brain

That’s the whole point of the right to exit—a final and decisive rescue of individual liberty at all costs. But exiting requires that people stay behind; if we all go, we’ll just have to storm out again. The entire point of the project is to separate the wheat from the chaff.

He posits that in this situation the “absolute limit to our ability to adequately understand the world at all” becomes increasingly relevant, and observes that this is a frequent theme of both philosophy and horror.

The truth is that, despite Land’s evident fascination with them, the bulk of neoreactionaries are not people one would want to have a beer with, and there’s not a great case for reading their books either.

Yudkowsky isn’t just running from error; he’s running from the idea of authority. The real horror of the Basilisk is that the AI at the end of the universe is just another third grade teacher who doesn’t care if you understand the material, just if you apply the rote method being taught.

Hauntology comes from within us; the Weird from outside.

The red pill, pwnage, and for that matter the horror reading, monstrous offspring, and Satanic inversions all follow the same basic pattern—a sort of conceptual infiltration of someone’s thought in which their own methods and systems are used against them.

It is, after all, the great one-liner critique of Mencius Moldbug: he’s exactly what you’d expect to happen if you asked a software engineer to redesign political philosophy. And crucially, Moldbug basically agrees with it—he just also genuinely believes that the Silicon Valley “disruptor” crowd would be capable of running the world with no problems if only people would let them.

Which is to say, Satan opens by negging Eve, accusing her of looking at him “with disdain, Displeas’d that I approach thee thus, and gaze Insatiate, I thus single, nor have feard Thy awful brow,”112 which may be the earliest instance of telling someone they have resting bitch face.

In the face of an ecologically brutal planet, the guys with guns and tribal loyalties are a depressingly compelling bet to stick around.

With Moldbug the sense is overwhelmingly that empathy just never crossed his mind as something to factor into his design. He flat out didn’t think of it. Yudkowsky, on the other hand, thinks about it a lot and cares very deeply about it; he’s just incompetent at it.

The result of this approach is that Yudkowsky, without really meaning to, tends to look at everyone else in the world as inefficient Eliezer Yudkowskys instead of people as such.

Moldbug, Yudkowsky, and Land don’t just “do poorly” with empathy—they represent the most visible and explicit edge of a Cathedral-scaled system of values that casts the desire to listen and try to understand people who are different from you as anathema to reason itself.

This forces us to consider white culture as a set of perpetual ruins—as something that has always been lost, and that can only be apprehended as a tenuous and incomplete reconstruction.

No, what’s really notable here is Moldbug’s doe-eyed certainty that such a thing as an absolute truth service could be built; that there is a general plan of action so self-evidently compelling that if he only expressed it properly everyone would immediately flock to his side. In short, after thousands of words railing against the Cathedral for secretly being a religion, he’s accidentally reinvented religion. And then lost the holy text. You couldn’t parody it better.

They have that marvelous feature of the best gods: perfectly answering a question you didn’t know you had.

And a few, such as Ahania, are genuinely breathtaking in their scope: a pleasure goddess representing intellectual curiosity who is bound in a Persephone-like structure of death and rebirth is a metaphysical/literary construct to rival Milton’s Satan, and one Blake barely scratches the surface of.

And it’s hard not to suggest that the world would be a better place if Yudkowsky had stuck to children’s literature for adult geeks as opposed to starting a weird AI cult that derails efforts to curtail malaria.

And while Gamergate usually doesn’t have a product to sell in quite the same literal way, it’s worth noting how, for instance, two doors down from them is someone like Stefan Molyneux, whose output amounts to 30-60 minute PowerPoint presentations consisting of a by-now familiar sort of low-content dissembling, and whose business endgame is literally a cult.

The Gamergate narrative has always required a vast quasi-conspiracy to function, some story whereby feminists or SJWs or cultural Marxists exercise near-complete control over video games and video game journalism.

Not even a monoculture then—an anticulture, with Vivian James ironically its perfect representation. It’s a desire to befit their worldview, its adamance dwarfed only by its fundamental emptiness. There’s nothing there. There’s never been anything there.

And Gamergate as a whole is scarcely better. It’s always been notable for its near-complete lack of actual discussion of videogames.

More interesting is where his basic inclination towards racial stereotyping originates from: the material realities of New York real estate, its patterns of historical ethnic migrations geologically stratified across the city’s expansion.

He might have had a name. But then he literally built a six-hundred-and-sixty-six foot tower to which he offered up that name, sacrificing it upon its black altar such that the building became a titanic sigil of the sixteenth Major Arcana of the Tarot of the Golden Dawn, symbolizing destruction and ruin, with only the remnants of the man whose name it ate living within the rotting heart of its penthouse.

He sold his name, yes, but what did he get out of the deal? The answer, simply put, is what he would hereafter treat as his most valuable asset: his brand. In short, he became a creature of pure image.

But it also includes the raw allostatic load of living under his rule; the basic psychological wear and tear of waking up every morning in a post-fact world dominated by a bullying narcissist. The act of living in a world where the basic validity of your identity is contingent and perpetually imperiled, where the very definition of “fact” is in dispute, and where a brutish logic of dominance and humiliation pervades the entire social order.

Individuals can act all they want. They won’t make the end of the world go away, any more than their freedom to quit work can make them free to not starve

It helps that one can be against today’s racist wars—though not on the grounds of anti-racism, except of the most specious variety—while quietly accepting and utilising the racial inequities inherited from the racist imperialism of the past. As usual, reactionary thinking is dependant upon amnesia.

It admits that value is a mental construct, but one that is ‘real’ because it has a real social basis and real social effects. Value, for Marx, is neither a thing nor an essence, neither quality nor spirit. It is a social reality because of what humans actually do.

Theoretically detached from the objective and the material, and connected to business as a client, mainstream economics has become—to a large extent—an ideological discourse.

This is how Moldbug and Thiel’s view that democracy is incompatible with liberty arises. A democracy is a society in which the mass of the population—who are, by definition, mostly without property—can shape policy so that it curtails the freedom of the propertied to make their choices. In a free society—by their definition—the capitalists get to make their choices unfettered.

For the Austrians, democracy is to blame for capitalism going into crisis. Democracy breeds special claims by people who are not really concerned with making the choices that regulate the economy. The people without a big stake—the masses—thus destabilise the system.

This is the so-called Austrian ‘Business Cycle.’ Boiled right down: crashes and recessions happen because central banks set interest rates too low. Easy credit results, which screws up market signals. Loaners go crazy. Bubbles inflate and burst. Such lopsided production can only be remedied via letting interest rates rise to their ‘natural’ rate. In other words, the Austrian prescription is: let the crisis rip. It will be harsher but quicker. The only cure for god’s wrath is to wait for the plague to exhaust itself.

Opposition to democracy is entailed by the Austrian view of how capitalism works. Democracy is the rule of the ignorant and selfish public, and the state is their tyrannical arm. Moronic majoritarianism wields unjustifiable power over the propertied and the entrepreneurs who are, for Hayek for instance, almost promethean artists in their special sensitivity and understanding.

The logically consequent idea that emergency dictatorship may be necessary to preserve liberal society from democracy is in neoliberalism’s source code. Neoliberalism, contrary to myth, is an authoritarian ideology, committed to defending property and wealth by violence both physical and structural.

The leaders of Rothbard’s revolution would be the libertarians and the minarchists. The troops would be the masses, spurred to fight the elites. And the spurring would take the form of appeals to racism.

The disproportionate number of former-libertarians in American fascism is revealing because conservatives are far more numerous in America than libertarians, which suggests that libertarianism is statistically over-represented.

The Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory now espoused across the alt-right is a reiteration of what the (actual) Nazis called kulturbolschewismus, an idea central to Nazi dogma, about degenerate art and culture being manufactured by Jewish communists to undermine the unity of the German people. The resurrection and repackaging of this idea across a movement soaked in libertarianism is not surprising, because antagonism to socialism goes right back to the dawn of libertarianism, to the Austrian School’s foundational and self-chosen role as the intellectual foe of Marx.

People might not necessarily formulate their objections to the content of newspapers that way, but they’re nevertheless absenting themselves from daily exposure to one of the main means by which the ruling class produce ideology and public consent. This is at least as big a concern to the people running the media as the need to claw back profits.

In all of these cases, the strategy is to play on insecurities of young men in an age where there are mounting ideological challenges out there—especially on the Internet—to their untroubled social privilege. Coupled with the twin legacies of decades of neoliberalism—increasing ideological and political disorientation, and a future far less secure than that which faced their parents and grandparents at their age—such challenges can terrify the semi-privileged layer of young, white, middle class men, who enjoy all those privileges without also enjoying actual material security.

Reactionary politics once again takes advantage of having a wide batrachian mouth, both sides of which may be used for talking.

The reason actions don’t lead inevitably to goals isn’t because there are complex material structures of oppression that heavily shape people’s lives, but because we exist in linear time. Not only does Rothbard not connect time to what dominates it for most people in capitalist society—work—but hilariously, he doesn’t even bother connecting time to its ultimate horror and constraint, death.

To quote the monster directly: “Milton produced Paradise Lost in the way that a silkworm produces silk, as the expression of his own nature.” Marx would like all labour to be like that, and sees no fundamental reason why it shouldn’t.

It’s pretty clear that the Austrian School doesn’t even remotely care about this fact, but it doesn’t inherently contradict anything they say. But that is, in the end, the point, and one I’ve made before: they don’t care. That’s clear, in a sense, all the way back in the basic axiom, with its active foregrounding of the heroic individual acting upon the world, as opposed to the state of affairs that most actual people experience, which is mostly being buffeted around by various external forces, whether they be governments, history, or the class system. Indeed, “individual human beings are acted upon” would be every bit as justifiable an axiom as “individual human beings act,” if not moreso.

They have been hugging Marxism on the brink of the Reichenbach Falls for a century and a half, staring into its eyes, but have never really seen it.

Mises’ only invocation of courage is in the context of statesmen standing up to labor unions. Decency only comes up in the context of “laws of morality and decency.” And his sole mention of kindness is a complete and grotesque misunderstanding of the very concept as he declares that “the indigent has no claim to the kindness shown to him,” as if being unearned isn’t the entire fucking point of kindness. It is a conception of human action without a shred of concern for empathy – human action devoid of all humanity.

But the real reason for this is that, more than anyone else, Marx provided an alternative to the charade on which their entire philosophical edifice was constructed. He showed the need for the destruction of that which, to them, gives the world meaning—and a method by which it might be achieved.

Given that no small number of conspiracy theories are, in point of fact, anti-Semitic, any attempt to uncritically synthesize them will be as well.

Icke’s theory is much the same way. We know wealthy elites control our minds. Knowing they’re lizards (or, for that matter, Jews) doesn’t actually change anything. It is, to borrow a phrase, malignantly useless knowledge.

Not only does nothing follow from Icke’s conclusions, nothing follows within the argument itself. Icke does not so much lay out a case for the lizard people as blunder among vague associations, hoping that the aggregate of a bunch of extremely tenuous connections will somehow be persuasive instead of a discombobulated mess of shoddy research and sloppy reasoning.

The history of the world consists of a lot of wealthy assholes sleeping with each other and killing people. Changing up which assholes slept with and killed who doesn’t actually make much of a difference.

Ridiculous arguments, especially ones that recognize their absurdity, are capable of revealing things that do not follow obviously, if at all, from self-consciously serious approaches, but that are nevertheless true and valuable realizations.

So is his inclination to be skeptical of the “official” version of history. The value of this, to be clear, is not simply skepticism for its own sake (an approach that is just as likely to lead to things like climate change denial or creationism as it is to some productive insight), but rather the realization that, as the saying goes, history is written by the victors, and the standard version of history is inevitably the one that most flatters those in power.

It is not entirely clear why monstrous truth must take reptilian form, but just as the weird turns instinctively to tentacles and the hauntological inevitably drifts towards skulls, for some reason awful truth must take the form of a reptile, whether a petrifying basilisk or just a bunch of pan-dimensional aliens.

This is a leftist book, and so must engage in a circular firing squad at least once.

This set a pattern whereby trans rights were repeatedly employed by the gay rights movement as a bargaining chip—as the thing they were pointedly willing to sell out in the name of compromise, as they spectacularly did when lobbying for the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, which excluded trans people in every version that was brought to Congress prior to 2009.

Thiel’s vision of corporate success is blatantly just the Moldbug/Land vision of how authoritarian capitalism will save us from the Great Filter.

Rather, it’s that once you’re willing to question the basic fact of Thiel’s competence it rapidly becomes apparent that the only actual evidence for this competence is that he has a lot of money.

And his fascination with seasteading numbers him among the litany of people interested in micronations, which is such a rich vein of complete crackpottery that I’d hate to deprive you of the pleasure of Googling it. This borders on the investment portfolio you’d get if you gave David Icke several billion dollars.

Who would craft such a thing as the alt-right? Only a fucking idiot. What other answer were we possibly going to find? It’s been idiots all the way down. And so of course even its billionaire supervillains bankrolling world-conquering AIs, vampiric life extension, and Donald Trump are idiots. This borders on “A is A.” And yet for all its obviousness, it captures what is perhaps the key realization about the alt-right—one that’s been implicit through much of this book, but is worth making explicit as we come to a close: they’re stupid.

I do not suggest this to diminish their horror. Far from it: the essential horror of the abyss is stupidity. That’s why it’s an abyss. The unique and exquisite danger of stupidity is that by its nature, it is beyond reason. There is nothing that can be said to it, because by definition it wouldn’t understand. It is an ur-basilisk—the one terrifying possibility that haunts every single argument that has ever been made. It is a move without response, playing by no rules other than its own, which do not generally include any obligation towards consistency. It is, in its way, the only approach that can never lose an argument. And in the alt-right and its affiliates we have one of the most staggeringly vast nexuses of raw stupidity the world has ever crafted.

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